Tenacity. Determination. Discipline. Consistency. Persistence. None of these are particularly exciting words or concepts, but these "boring" traits underpin success in life, whether it is managing your health, mindset, mental well-being, relationships, career, business, or any other part of your life.
These traits are habits. And in order to be able to access, ignite, and control them, we need to use them often; practice and make them stronger. They are muscles. We need to tear them down in order to build them back up, bigger and stronger than before. Pain is just a part of the process.
I've had several health setbacks in the past couple of years, which isn't particularly surprising for someone with fibromyalgia.
We may all struggle with different challenges in our lives, but the very thing that we have in common, is that struggle. One of mine is trying to stay consistently active.
During the 5-6 years in my twenties that I spent trying to get a diagnosis, one of the things I experienced a lot was chronic fatigue, muscle tightness, and chronic pain. As you can imagine, there wasn't a whole lot of physical activity going on then. It doesn't particularly help that I don't have a great childhood foundation in using and developing more awareness and control over my body (hello bookworm and couch potato), and was never encouraged otherwise.
Fast forward to me in my thirties and the accompanying growing realisation that everything in the body starts to slow down; energy, metabolism, recovery, and the ability to bounce back from any extra exertion. It became quickly apparent that further lifestyle changes are required if I plan to live out my older years in good health instead of a sickbed. Diet and nutrition are actually the easiest. I have a keen and vested interest, both personal and professional, and it was particularly fulfilling to finish off my qualification in Nutrition Science with Stanford University Online during the latter half of lockdown.
But good gosh, moving is still hard. It's too hot. Then too cold. It's not just whinging on my part, but that my body doesn't cope well with extreme temperature changes after fibro, and I happen to live in Melbourne (ha!) where we can experience up to 25°C variance in a matter of hours. I had migraines from not covering up my head during winter, minor frostbite on my ears from wind chill, and had to take time to recover. I had hay fever and the resulting chronic fatigue in spring, then migraines from the sun and light exposure in summer, and had to take time to recover. Autumn is nice, and hey, isn't that a win that I can still enjoy one complete season without having to take so many precautions?
And then there's the exercise itself. The gym is too boring and I can't keep myself motivated. I have flat feet and a lack of fibro fatty padding which means they get tired, sore, and bruised easily - I've never developed any fondness for walking, running, or hiking after all these years because of this, no matter how pretty the landscape. It's too easy to push myself overboard in classes because I'm competitive and want to keep up. Sea swimming and water sports are a particular love, but it's only bearable in the heights of summer because of how cold the sea is here.
My one visit to an exercise physio results in her telling me sternly that I should learn to accept that 10 mins walk on a low day is a win, not a waste of time. My partner tells me that I keep pushing myself too hard to do just that little bit more, and in anyone else that would be a trait that is applauded, but with my unfortunate genetics is just self-sabotage.
It's a perfect storm of valid reasons and underlying perfectionist, high-productivity tendencies getting in my own way.
Sometimes these challenges are overwhelming. It's not easy to feel like a prisoner in your own body. But in the end, we are dealt the hands we are dealt, and life is never fair. We can't change the challenges given to us, but we can control how we respond to them.
So I simply started where I could, and kept looking for ways to motivate myself to keep going.
I started walking at the end of the two-year lockdowns in 2021 because my stamina was too low for anything else. It was just 3,000 steps at first, then 5,000. It was going well until I reached 10,000 steps during a high pollen day and then developed a fever that night and was knocked out for the next three weeks. Whoops.
Okay, it's spring. Stay indoors. So I got a Nintendo Switch to play Ring Fit at home. About a 50% success rate, but on high allergy days my energy was so low I couldn't motivate myself to even go downstairs. Right. So I had to lower the barrier to entry. I put a yoga mat beside my bed so I could coax myself to at least do a 10 or 20 min stretching session from Youtube, because I could tell myself all I had to do was roll out of bed for 10 minutes. Even I could do that, right? Right.
Even with some failures along the way, I managed to get back up to a basic level of movement most days and learned not to beat myself up on the days I didn't.
I went to the Great Barrier Reef on a semi-private catamaran trip in early 2022 and had the time of my life. It had been a long time since I'd felt so energised. When my calorie consumption averages only about 1,300-1,500 cal daily because my activity level is basically sedentary, I burned 2,800 calories daily on the five-day trip because I was warm for once, and there was basically unlimited snorkeling, kayaking, SUP-ing, and I was almost refusing to get out of the water at the end of the day. Toward the end, I had a bit of vertigo and chalked it up to too much activity. Came home with COVID. Was very mild. But a week after I recovered, I suddenly had full-blown vertigo and hives for two weeks. Annnddd... had to take time to recover again.
Mid-year I left for a three-month business trip to Malaysia, knowing and anticipating that I would be very busy and would have to pace myself through the months as well as deal with more difficult access to healthy food, a disrupted gut microbiome, and stress. I was actually very surprised with how well my body held up physically. When I travelled heavily before COVID grounded all of us for years, my body really struggled to adapt to the weather, the timezones, and the struggle to sleep where I didn't have a great setup - I always had gut troubles as well.
It felt really validating to see that my health was improving even as I was getting older, in spite of my chronic condition. We only have one body to inhabit in this lifetime, and if that isn't a worthy cause to work on, what else is?
Riding a bit too high on that confidence, I allowed myself to be pressured past the hard boundary I had set to take a full break from work and events in the last 10 days of our trip. We had extended it from 10 weeks to 13, and it still wasn't done. But I was done. My body was done. My sleep schedule was slipping, I was starting to need days to just rest, but I allowed myself to be dragged along anyway because others had roused themselves far too late and now wanted more of what we did.
That was a mistake. When you're run down, your immune system is run down. Living in the same place and conditions as my partner and the people around me, I'm the only one that manages to pick up a skin infection from my environment unknowingly. It starts as a patch of what looks like eczema on my cheek and I treat it as such.
I return to Melbourne into one of the worst allergy seasons they've had in years and it gets worse. I just continue plugging away at multiple important projects I have on my plate that are really interesting and in November it all just blows up.
The red patches spread all over my damn face and then it starts to peel constantly. I mean, I have to sweep up anywhere I'm sitting for a few hours because I've shed so much dry skin I'm not even sure how my body keeps making any. Well, it obviously can't keep up because I've lost the entire top layer, you can tell the lower layers are exposed, it's cracking, I look like a century-old mummy, and the worst thing is that everything hurts. Air. Water. Heat. Cold. The pain is absolutely debilitating and sends me to my bed again. The first doctor says it's eczema. The second calls in backup for a second opinion. The third decides it's an infection and starts a month-long course of antibiotics and topical steroids to bring my skin back under control. The waiting list for a dermatologist is insane. I've been to the salt rooms, the actual sea (that hurt), the acupuncturist, and have swallowed a ton of skin supplements and collagen to help my histamine-riddled, inflamed self cope in the meantime.
Eventually, I get an appointment with a blessedly knowledgable, kind, sarcastic dermatologist who tells me the infection is gone but now I have eczema so bad she wants me to stick my face in a vat of Vaseline because that's now my skin barrier as I have none. It's gotten so much better now but the inflammation is still taking a while to completely disappear.
Did you know when you lose your skin barrier everything else in your body goes haywire? I have random bouts of insane itchiness in the middle of the night. My hay fever lasts right into the end of summer this year. I get prickly heat for the first time in years, more muscle stiffness, more migraines, more chronic pain.
Less importantly, but equally upsetting is that I've lost the entire summer season I planned to get even more active and enjoy all my water activities. Instead, I've hidden away from the sun entirely and like a wilted plant, am feeling the effects.
If you're like me and it takes a while to get that engine started, you'll resonate with my frustration at all these roadblocks because it takes so much more energy to start again from a point of inertia than when you have some momentum going. It's at these times when all you have to rely on is that mental muscle, that grit and determination, to keep going.
I've been lucky enough to be able to reap the rewards of choosing to start my own business eight years ago, because I'm not sure any job would be able to give me a four-month paid leave, much less lighter workloads on all those times I've been less than healthy. I'm not sure I would have been able to keep working through the most recent health setback at all.
I've been lucky that I made the choice to keep building my health foundations all through these years, because my dermatologist said I've bounced back amazingly fast from not really having an outer skin layer for months before I saw her.
I've been lucky that grit is a muscle I'm now used to using, through gritted teeth (pun intended), to re-start my exercise routine from scratch, again.
I downloaded a walking game called Pikmin Bloom recently to help me start another 28 day challenge to be more active (#GlobalGalaxy10kChallenge). And may have chased down too many flowers two weeks in and ended up with muscle soreness through my feet and legs so bad I couldn't sleep and couldn't walk for a couple of days. But I know that tomorrow I can start again.
It's okay that I don't always know my body's limits. The goalposts move a fair bit. But I can practice getting to understand it better and treat it better.
It's okay that I have another setback later on. Because every time I climb back up I exercise my mental strength and determination to live the fullest life I can.
It's okay that others don't understand my limits. Fibromyalgia isn't an easy condition to understand, especially if you're young and strong and have never really run out of energy before. But I have to keep communicating what they are and refuse to compromise on my hard limits, or risk hurting myself and losing even more time being out of commission.
And it's okay that the struggles you are facing, whatever they are, scare you, overwhelm you, or make you sad. But you have to get back up and keep going. Because you have a life to live that can only get better when you get better. And the most important thing you can do to help yourself is to practice having grit.
A good place to start?
#StartSomething for yourself this March, whether it's something healthy, something challenging, or something that improves you, and carry it through for at least 21 days to make it a habit. I'd love to know what it is if you'd like to share!